Just Williams

I can see the future …

... though of course the usual terms and conditions apply as David Williams gazes into his knockoff crystal ball and speculates about what might be in store for the world of wine in the coming year

Before reading an article dealing in forecasts and coming trends, I always like to check the author’s track record. Are they really the far-sighted oracle the article implicitly suggests they must be? Or do they make their lordly predictions in the full knowledge that almost nobody will remember them once enough time has passed to prove them entirely wrong?

In this case, I’ve done the due diligence for you. That means you can read the following in the full knowledge that my predictive abilities are some way short of the late, great Paul the Octopus, the German cephalopod who, Wikipedia tells me, managed to foretell the results of 12 out of 14 of the major tournament football games his keepers at Oberhausen zoo “asked” him to predict in the 2000s and 2010s.

So, no, we are not all drinking the Canadian wines I said we would be back in 2017. And of course, Riesling and Sherry, those perennial features of the wishfulthinking lists of wine hacks all over the world, have still not made their oftpromised comeback.

Other speculations of mine have started to fade after promising beginnings. There was a time when Mencía genuinely seemed to have a chance of achieving the same sort of ubiquity as its fellow north western Spanish grape variety Albariño in the UK, for example. But, in terms of listings, it seems to have fallen back in the past couple of years. Similarly, as far as I can tell, Slovenian and Croatian wines have not sustained the momentum I thought I had spotted at the turn of the decade.

So, you can take the following with a pinch of salt – a substance that has, incidentally, and in a way I didn’t see coming, become quite a popular tasting term over the past couple of years. My predictions for the year ahead start in that territory, amid the recherché world of tasting talk. If you pay as much attention as I do to tasting notes (as well as writing them myself, I edit and read thousands of the things written by other people each year) you will have noticed that wine talk is in the midst of a generational change, with the emphasis increasingly switching from how a wine tastes (bye-bye superspecific fruits and flavours) to how it feels (hello endless disquisitions on long-chain tannins). I fully expect this trend of talking about wine’s structure or (an increasingly fashionable term, this) architecture, to continue in more mainstream communications and sales patter in 2023.

Of course, unless someone with some powerful language-analysis software and a lot of time on their hands decides to test my thesis, this is one assertion that I can make happy in the knowledge that its accuracy is all but impossible to check.

My second prediction is only slightly easier to measure, but it’s no less sincere: I genuinely think 2023 is going to be the year when Greek wines become part of the UK wine-drinking mainstream. The fact that I have said the same thing every time I’ve written an article like this over the past 20 years doesn’t, in my view, undermine my position: there’s been real, incremental progress by Greek wine over that time. But last year was the first time Greek wines routinely formed a key part of so many supermarket and multiple specialist ranges, and the quality-and-interest-tovalue ratio has never been better.

If that’s a trend I’m very happy about, I’m

I genuinely think 2023 is going to be the year when Greek wines become part of the mainstream. The quality-and-interestto-value ratio has never been better

Clutching at straws: is passito wine already passé?

rather less keen on the continued rise of passito-style wines in Italy. I imagine they’ll be even more numerous in 2023, since the method of using quantities of dried grapes in various ways seems to be an economical way of adding depth and sweetness to simple red wines, and so many of my nonwine trade friends seem to have fallen in love with them (and the value they seem to offer) over the past year. In 2022 I tried numerous so-so me-too examples from Argentina, South Africa and Australia, and I fully expect more producers in more countries to follow the raisin-scented money this year.

Other price-driven trends that it seems to me will escalate, should inflation and the cost-of-living crisis continue, include more listings for charmat-method English sparkling wines and a revival of the fortunes of the cheapest of the bottlefermented sparklers, Cava. And, just as the supermarkets have put so much of their efforts into reviving the fortunes of that recently endangered species, the drinkable five-pound wine, so independents will be spending much of 2023 trying to find wines that satisfy their increasingly crucial £9.99 price point.

Moving away from the highvolume commercial frontline, judged on the tastings I’ve been attending lately, the fine-wine trend for blurring genre-boundaries I wrote about in this space back in November is not going away, with skin-contact whites, orange wines, infused reds and structured rosés taking up more and more slots in suppliers’ listings.

Many of those wines make a virtue of the ever-growing love of old vines, an affection that has been impressively harnessed and developed over the past couple of years by the Old Vine Conference organisation. Mere age isn’t enough to satisfy the true old-vine heads, however, and the next big thing in viticulturally oriented wine production and labelling is already emerging. 2023 as the year of ungrafted vines? You heard it here first [and quite possibly last – Ed].

We made an IPA for our eighth birthday

South London independent Hop Burns & Black teamed up with a much-admired brewery from Sussex to create an IPA to celebrate another milestone in the company’s history

Hop Burns & Black has marked its eighth birthday in style by collaborating with Beak Brewery in East Sussex to create its own IPA.

Jen Ferguson and Glenn Williams, who launched Hop Burns & Black in south east London in 2014, are no strangers to developing products that echo the name of their business. Since opening they have celebrated each year by collaborating with their favourite suppliers to devise their own limited-edition beer (hop), hot sauce (burns) and coffee (black).

“We’ve done so much work with Beak in the last year,” says Ferguson, “and we sell so many of their beers. They are certainly in the top three breweries that our customers are in love with.

“Apart from that, we’ve been friends with Danny [Tapper, who runs Beak] for many years. In fact I think he was cooking up the idea for the brewery sitting on our outside tables; it was still a little twinkle in his eye. So we go way back and this seemed like a perfect time to celebrate our long-time friendship.

“Although a lot of our team had already been down to Beak in Lewes, I hadn’t, so it was a very good excuse to get out of the office and visit them. It’s a spectacular location.”

For Ferguson, each collaboration starts with her approaching a brewery and presenting an outline of what she has in mind. “We want it to be beneficial to both parties,” she says. “We don’t want to do some weird style that’s going to sell very little. We want to make sure if they’re doing a whole brew for us that it’s a really popular style that’s going to sell loads and loads.

“We always go for either a pale ale or an IPA for our birthday brews because we know that Christmas is coming up and they’re both very popular styles.”

In the case of the Beak project, the starting point was Parade, the brewery’s core IPA. It’s a best seller at Hop Burns & Black and loved by the team, who thought if they could put their own spin on it, it was bound to be a winner.

A few recipes and ideas were “kicked around over email” before Ferguson and Nathan Taylor, the Peckham store manager, got stuck in at Beak for a day’s brewing, admiring the scenery, but also doing “the grunt work”, digging out the mash tun.

“The beer is tasting fantastic,” Ferguson says. “We had an idea of what it was going to taste like because we knew how the hops were smelling on the day and we knew what the malt bill was going to be.

“I was working in Deptford on the day I had my first taste of it. It was pouring with rain and I thought, here’s this can with a smiley sun on it – a kind of bright spot on a very gloomy day. It’s really citrussy, it’s got this very lemony zest to it. It’s really easy drinking and just delicious.”

Hop Burns & Black took delivery of 650 cans of Bop before Christmas, which it will sell along with the latest birthday editions of hot sauce (a collaboration with Leedsbased Thicc), and coffee from Lomond, one of the team’s favourite coffee suppliers.

Bop will also be available to purchase from Beak Brewery, while stocks last.

We’re listening.

The Wine Merchant magazine’s annual industry survey is back.

Every January, independent wine specialists from all across the UK spare 15 minutes of their time to tell us a little about how business is going, and how they expect things to pan out in the coming year.

The data that we collect helps us put together unrivalled analysis of everything that’s happening in the indie trade, which we publish online and in our March and April editions.

We respect the privacy of all contributors, and don’t share any individual information.

Our partner once again is Hatch Mansfield, who have generously supplied prizes for five participants selected at random.

Visit winemerchantmag.com to take part, or follow the links on our Twitter and Instagram pages.